


(Sounds) Stay With Me

by SpookySad



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Anxiety, Drabble, Gen, Misophonia, Pre Bandito Tour, Tyler's Basement Days, band-verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 19:20:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17731118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpookySad/pseuds/SpookySad
Summary: When Tyler's anxiety is high, his headphones are on.





	(Sounds) Stay With Me

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work for my dear friend Kenzie. It's a romantic sounding piece, but there's nothing romantic about misophonia and the suffering it brings to lovely people.

Tyler has his headphones on. 

They were worth the money: Dolby, over-the-ear, and Bluetooth compatible. That makes it easy for him to adjust the specs without anyone knowing, means he doesn’t have to worry about cords tying him to his phone. On days like this when his anxiety is high, he feels enough like he’s tied down and tied up without a cord holding him to his phone like a makeshift umbilical cord. 

Josh is visiting, staying at Tyler’s house in Columbus for the week. The responsibility of hosting drags him out of the depths of his basement, from the confines of his bed. He gets so few moments to spend with the other half of his band nowadays, with the drummer living in LA and spending more time planning his future with Debby. These moments are precious. It isn’t fair for his brain to ruin a single second of them. He wishes that more things were fair.

He ventures downstairs in the early morning to find that Josh is perched on the sofa eating cereal, and there are a lot of noises that come with it: the spoon against the bowl, the sloshing of milk, the _crunchcrunchcrunch_ with every bite. Using his phone, he turns down the noise that the headphones let in. Down, and down, and down. 

Jenna comes in, tanned from spending time in the Midwestern summer sun. Tyler lifts a trembling finger off of his phone in greeting, gratefully accepts the kiss she plants on his forehead. He motions to his headphones. _Do you want me to take these off?_ He’s asking. She shakes her head, kisses her fingertips and then presses them to the band of the headphones.

“What’s he listening to?” She asks Josh. Tyler can barely pick up her words. 

“Carnival music probably,” Josh says. Face buried in his phone, Tyler snorts so softly that neither of them notice. “He’s having a bad day.” 

“Did he say that?”

 _No_ , Tyler thinks. No he _hadn’t_ said that. But apparently Josh had known. Guilty for listening when they think he isn’t, he adjusts the headphones. Active Noise Cancelling. The relief is instantaneous, no crunching, no clicking, nothing from the television or outside. Even more guilt comes, though—guilt for his anxiety (there’s not even a _reason_ , no breadcrumb trail he can follow in his brain to explain why he woke up feeling like this today, like every sense was turned up and there was no peace to be found). This isn’t normal. Normal has never had a place in his life, but he never knew that he could miss so bad something that he’d never had. 

“I’m going to grab a shower,” Tyler says. He can’t even hear his own voice. Instead of heading upstairs to the master bath, he heads downstairs where it’s five degrees cooler, where the air is stale from spending so much time with the door closed. 

Tyler never makes it into the shower, just sits on the floor outside it with the water going. The water pressure is even. There’s nothing to displace the pattern as it beats against the tile. The roar dulls the blood in his ears, and this is nice. This is okay. When he can’t spend a moment longer pretending to shower, he drags himself to his studio. It’s even mustier in here than anywhere else in the basement—yeah, he probably could have used that shower, he thinks, nose wrinkling. 

He switches the active device for his headphones from his phone to his computer. There are mixes up—minimized, never closed, because he doesn’t think he spends more than seven hours away from this computer and this music at a time. It’s scary to be here, to be making new music. He never thought he’d be so comfortable being scared. 

Letting the most recent work play, he turns the headphones up, up, up this time. His bass is a heavy, welcome weight in his arms. Behind his eyelids are hectic, haphazard scenes: ideas for the tour, things he’s still letting bloom and run rampant in his head before he bothers trying to chase them down and explain them to anyone else. 

When he has bad days (like today), there aren’t many sounds that he wants to hear. The world feels too abrasive until everything feels out to get him, out to hurt. It shouldn’t be like this. It shouldn’t feel like he’s in a warzone battling against things that he knows other people have no problem with, that he knows they aren’t doing to hurt him ( _crunchcrunchcrunch_ ). Up there, it’s not fair. But down here, he’s in a world of his own creation, where every sound was built by his hands. So long as he has this, maybe he’ll always be okay. For a moment or two. 

And there’s going to be a part during the Bandito Tour where he splits the crowd like he did for Doubt in the old days. He can hardly wait to hear ten thousand people singing it back to him, singing it _with_ him.

His fingers move silently over the bass in his hands, mouthing the words along with the mix while it plays. “ _Stay with me, no, you don’t need to run…”_

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on twitter @ Spooky_Sad.
> 
> Thanks to my lovely patrons, adsnoggin, Alysha, Angie, Aphrodite, Bee, elucidation, Kenzie, and Sam. <3


End file.
